Do Black Holes Live Forever?

6/09/2014

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Black holes are one of the
most frightening and terrifying cosmic objects that wander the huge universe.
They have a gravitational force so tough that even light cannot escape from it.
Black Holes have been around a long time. To even terminate a black hole it’s extremely
unbelievable. So a question rises here and possibly you have thought it too, do
black holes live forever? Well there is a reaction to that and the tiny form is
no they don’t live forever. We now know that black holes essentially evaporate
over time and contract. The man who finally replied this question for us is nobody
else other than Stephen Hawking (you must have heard of him). In 1974 he calculated
the area close to the black holes horizon by means of the laws of quantum
mechanics. For those of you who don’t know, quantum mechanics defines what occurs
on the smallest scale possible. When we are talking about the lowest scale, we
are talking about on atomic levels or even sub-atomic levels.

Atrist's Impression of a Black Hole – Credit: http://chandra.harvard

The theory states that minute
particles and light are uninterruptedly created and destroyed on sub-atomic
scales. The particles that pop in and out of life are called positive particles
and negative antiparticles. Some of the light generated has a very small chance
of escaping before it gets shattered. If you were observing on you would see as
if the black holes horizon was blushing. The energy of this glow drops the
black holes mass and will continue till it is all disappeared.

Though, a point worth stating
is that Hawkings glow (or also known as Hawkings radiation) doesn’t actually
apply to any of the black holes that occur in our universe, at least not in the
way you consider. The temperature of the glow in those black holes is nearly 0
and the loss of energy is minor. The quantity of time for the black holes in
our universe to vanish will take more than a billion times a billion times a
billion times a billion times a billion times a billion times the age of the universe
to vanish entirely. However, if a black hole was the size of a cruise ship it
would vanish within seconds. If you had a trillion years to standby and you desired
to watch a black hole die you would see it shrink up until it got so small that
it became brutally unstable. At this point it would have an enormously violent
burst or a gamma ray burst and discharge all the energy back into the cosmos.

It’s exciting to see the concepts of the very
small come together with the concepts of the very large. Black holes do certainly
die.